Defending champion Keselowski could miss Chase

Tony Stewart’s defense of his 2005 championship doesn’t look so bad on paper, and it sure seemed to be soaring during his laborious celebratory fence-climb following his July win at Daytona.

It was his second win of the 2006 season, and it pushed him to fifth in the championship standings. Little did he know that hot summer night atop the flag stand would be his crowning achievement of the year.

Disastrous finishes in the next two races dropped Stewart to 11th in the standings with only seven races to recover. It was too big of a hole and Stewart stunningly became the first defending NASCAR champion to miss the cut for the Chase for the championship in what was then a 10-driver field.

In true Stewart fashion, he didn’t go out with a whimper: Stewart won three of the 10 Chase races, but wasn’t eligible to challenge Jimmie Johnson in what became the first of Johnson’s five consecutive Sprint Cup titles.

Now here we are, seven years later, and another defending champion is in a similar hole.

Brad Keselowski heads into Saturday night’s race at Daytona ranked 13th in the standings and winless this year. He’s got nine races left to claim a berth in the 12-driver field, and is among a handful of elite drivers jockeying for the final few spots in the Chase:

_ Keselowski: BK had three wins at this point last season but finds himself on the outside looking in after Sunday’s disappointment at Kentucky, where he had hoped to repeat last year’s victory. His problems Sunday started 48 laps in the race _ so early that Keselowski said “there is no reason to drive like an animal” _ when Kurt Busch drove on the apron, then shot back up the track into traffic and into Keselowski.

It created a messy accident that stopped the race for nearly 20 minutes and it dropped Keselowski four spots in the standings to 13th. To earn a Chase berth, he either needs to be ranked inside the top 10 in points, or needs wins to be eligible to claim one of two wild card spots.

“We were just holding onto the top 10 there, and we were one bad race away from falling out,” he said after the race.

There is an upside to Keselowski’s situation. He is only 14 points behind 10th-place driver Joey Logano, his Penske Racing teammate. That’s not bad considering the No. 2 team has been docked 31 points this year in a pair of NASCAR penalties. If Keselowski still had those points he’d be ranked eighth.

But he doesn’t have those points and has two months to make up the difference.

“We have struggled before as a team and we have worked through that and put ourselves in position to be champions,” Wolfe said. “I think in the past we have not been shy of doing some different strategies to make things happen and over the next few weeks if we are not getting the finishes where we need to be then we will need to look at that over the last month closing into the Chase.”

_ Busch: The 2004 champion is in the second year of trying to resurrect a career that fell apart when his anger issues cost him his job at Penske Racing. He’s doing it now with Furniture Row Racing, a single-car team that’s not supposed to challenge for a Chase berth.

But Busch is in decent shape at 14th in the standings and only 16 points out of 10th. He’s gotten there behind four finishes of seventh or better in the last six races, including Sunday, when he managed to come back from the early incident on the apron to finish sixth. All told, Busch has seven top-10 finishes this season and has climbed from six spots in the standings in three races.